Paris withstood the Norsemen and gained in importance by so doing.
Then the rulers of these same Normans became not only conquerors of England, but rulers of various parts of the west of what is now France. To the common people it mattered little who ruled them, but on the whole the ruler of England, just because he was ruler of England, was rather less trusted than the ruler in Paris, and eventually all the various units acknowledged the ruler in Paris as supreme. This process was hastened because the King of England and his representatives unconsciously looked on the lands south of the Channel as foreign ; e. g. the Black Prince ravaged southwards from Bordeaux for no other reason than to obtain booty.
Now France being a land whose centre is Paris, the actual limits of France are of less account, but they are clearly marked by the sea on the north and west and part of the south. On the western half of the south there is a highland region, the Pyrenees, which also marks off fairly definitely the limits of France in that direction; only on the east there is no such definite frontier.
Within these limits France, during a great part of her history, was occupied by the evolution of a national unity. Her people were almost entirely engaged in agriculture. With a pleasant climate, neither over warm in summer nor cold in winter, with sufficient rainfall, and for the most part a fertile soil, France produced food enough for her people. There was little to tempt or force them on to the seas. There was little to tempt them beyond their own lands, except on the east. French armies and French navies there were, but they were for defence. No considerable number of her people were sailors, for there was little to be gained on the sea.
Here, then, is France, her south-east within touch of the early civilizations of the Mediterranean, so that Marseilles was a Greek city and Provence was the first Roman Province outside the peninsula of Italy, and the language of the people is but a dialect of Latin ; set between Spain and Holland, facing the open Atlantic and having opportunities for ocean power, but with a doubtful frontier on the east which seems to tempt to land expansion ; and yet self-sufficient if she would.
The later history of France has been dominated at one time by a trust in that self-sufficiency, at another by attempts at land expansion, and at a third by a desire to obtain control of ocean power ; while always the centralizing effect of Paris has been to introduce a systematizing centralization into each policy.
This state, then, was an agent in bringing about the downfall of the ocean power of the Dutch, but was not able herself to gain command of that ocean power because her interests were divided.
By the middle of the fifteenth century the unification of France round Paris was complete; by the end of the century Provence, Brittany and the Duchy of Burgundy had been added. The first and second then lay farthest from the centralizing influence of Paris, the last on that debateable middle land where no definite natural frontier exists. But this led to trouble with the land power on the east, and for another fifty years the external history of France is taken up with the story of the attempts to hold this new eastern frontier, while the internal history shows us France united under an absolute monarch in Paris, now the finest city in Europe.
Thence onward for another half-century this united centralized France had to grapple with the problems of religious contention introduced into all the northern lands by the doctrines of the Reformation. By 1600 these problems had found a solution, and this united France remained Catholic.
By this time the Dutch were entering on their career overseas. The aims of the rulers of France were beginning to be influenced by these new conditions, but still the fact that the eastern border was an indefinite land frontier determined that the policy should be divided. Richelieu aimed at the develop ment of a great sea-power which should add to the wealth of the kingdom, but he also aimed at the extension of the boundaries of France to the eastward, so that more agricultural land should be under French rule. The result of this double attempt was to destroy the power of Holland, to weaken the power of Austria which now dominated the land beyond the French frontiers, and eventually to cripple seriously the power of France. -These results were, however, brought about largely because of the influence of the latest ocean power of the northern world. We must, then, consider the geographical conditions of Britain as far as they have affected the course of history.